The day before the appearance of several main technology leaders before Congress, begging for ways to gain more energy for the emerging American artificial intelligence industry, Donald Trump signed an executive order offering the solution: increased coal production.
“You know, we must perform AI, all this new technology that is coming online,” Trump said on Tuesday during the signing ceremony of all four executive orders. “We need more than twice the energy, electricity that we currently have.”
It is an inelegant and enthusiastic solution for a real, approaching problem that escalates with the rapid adoption of AI technology in America: how to power all data centers needed to calculate the requirements. Wednesday’s interrogation at House Energy and Commerce Committee only emphasized how much AI will be integrated with everyday life, from national security to household tasks, and and largely focused on the power itself, which would have to be poured into supporting this infrastructure. According to witnesses, including the former General Director of Google Eric Schmidt, Micron Technology EVP Manish Bhatia and CEO Scale AI Alexandr Wang, industry needs a consistent, reliable energy.
“We need energy in all forms. Renewable, unjustified, whatever. It must be there and must be there quickly.”
“[W]You need energy, and the numbers are deep, “said Schmidt in your opening testimony.” We need energy in all forms. Renewable, unlawful, whatever. It must be there and it must be there quickly. “Indeed, study with the Electric Power Research Institute, cited in the announcement of the hearing committee, prohibited Data centers can consume as much as 9.1 percent of all energy in the United States until the end of the decade.
Bhatia quoted a separate study in its testimonies suggesting that due to this development, the overall energy consumption will enhance by 15 percent over the next five years – a huge jump from classic by a 0.5 percent enhance in energy consumption over the past few decades – and warned that without an approach to energy that would be based on many fuel sources to maintain low costs, “risk threatened in AI.”
But even though Trump was a long -term coal amplifier attempt To save Zakłady Węglowe before closing in 2018, the American coal industry has fallen over the past few decades, when consumers are approaching alternative forms of energy, such as oil, natural gas and green energy. Carbon currently accounts for 15 percent of the American energy supply – a acute decline since 2011, when it provided almost half of it – and as the demand for coal is decreased, as well as the ability to transform it into energy. According to Modern York Times report Since February, only 400 coal power plants have been operating in the USA today, compared to 780 in 2000, and almost half of the others have retirement in the next few decades. However, almost a third of these plants either crossed their lives after the planned retirement, or was completely saved from retirement, thanks to the rapid enhance in energy demand – although experts warned Times It is probably not enough to reverse the decrease in coal.
At the same time, leaning into coal can be an ethical puzzle for AI leaders, without saying anything about the technology industry, which has long been promoting as a supporter of green energy. In particular, the general director of Opeli, Altman himself, strongly pressed for sustainable energy as a source of power of the data center, investing in everything from sunny Down nuclear fusion down Startup for capturing coal Measuring current emissions as a way to quickly scale the supply of low-cost energy. But with Trump locked in an international trade war, which already threatens the future of the technology industry, it is not clear whether they can afford Trump’s obsession with coal – as he said during the signing ceremony: “Never use the word” coal “unless you do not put” handsome, neat “before him” – stay in business.